IncongruousGoat

No offense to the people in this thread, but I'm getting the feeling none of y'all have actually read the article. Quoting the literal first line (emphasis mine):

To elaborate a little more: what this thing does is provide a system that, strictly in parallel with a paper ballot system, electronically records all the votes in a (nominally) secure fashion using the power of cryptography. It then (again, in parallel with the paper ballots, which throughout all this have remained completely unchanged) provides A: individual voters with a mechanism by which to check if their vote has been registered and counted correctly, and B: a mechanism by which arbitrary third parties may validate the election as a whole, both without violating voter privacy and without providing avenues by which to interfere with the vote. Let me once again note that none of the above in any way, shape, or form changes the process or procedure around paper ballots, and cannot be used to change any votes that were written down on said paper ballots. At least, this is what Microsoft claims that their system does. As I said earlier, I'm going to hold off on either advocating for or against it until I know exactly what it does under the hood.

Okay, so, perhaps I wasn't clear enough the first time around: THIS THING THAT MICROSOFT HAS MADE IS NOT AN E-VOTING SYSTEM. It is NOT, repeat, NOT intended to replace traditional ballots. Seriously. We can all stop running around like chickens with our heads cut off. E-voting is bad, but this isn't e-voting. This is something else (and something much more interesting, IMO). @Shpaget You may want to change the thread title, because people here seem to be reading it without reading the article and panicking as a result.

Location: Gensokyo 3/10, had to resort to Google to figure it out.

*puts on computer security hat* Okay, so having read the article, they're not trying to replace paper ballots; they're just trying to supplement paper ballots by making certain information about the election more widely available and verifiable. Let me emphasize: This is NOT an e-voting system. Some of their claims regarding security and behavior seem pretty straightforward to me (e.g. the stuff about homomorphic encryption), while others are less so (e.g. the stuff about an "open verifier"). We don't know very much about the actual implementation details yet, so I'm going to withhold judgment until they release the source code and I can actually work out what it is they've done.

In the house I've been living in for the last 2 semesters, there have been weeks when we've had to buy 120 eggs, just for that week. Partly it's because one of us is (was, I suppose - he's left now) a boxer, and would eat 8 eggs for breakfast every day, but still. 120 eggs.

Hmmm. I like the look of this DLC, a lot. Surface ops are, IMO, perfect DLC fodder. New and inexperienced players don't need to pick it up, because they're still at the stage where the journey matters so much more than the destination. Us veterans, who've sunk hundreds or thousands of hours in, can very reasonably afford a little extra for some more stuff to do in the ground. Plus, Infernal Robotics is old and a pain in the neck to get working, and a stock replacement seems really useful to me. I didn't buy Making History because it didn't (and doesn't) offer anything I'm interested in, but I would totally buy this one. Except. My only active KSP install right now is stuck back in 1.3.1, since RSS/RO/RP-0 are (understandably) super slow to update. I just don't play stock much anymore. I could buy it anyways, to support Squad, but if that reasoning really appealed to me then I would have bought Making History. Which I didn't. It's a damn shame, because Breaking Ground looks really good.

It lives? ... It lives! Huzzah! Good to see that this is still a thing.

Actually, the delta-V requirement for Minmus is substantially lower than that for the Mun. You need (conservatively) ~100 m/s more for the transfer, but make it up by needing ~1 km/s less for capture, landing, ascent, and return. This matters because it means that it's possible to land a Kerbal on Minmus with a fully T1 space center, while the Mun requires 2 launches and a docking within those same restrictions.

History time! The original design in the chain that lead to the Jupiter-C included that fourth stage - it was part of a 1955 proposal called Project Orbiter, concocted by von Braun and the Huntsville Arsenal in 1955 as a proposal for the IGY (International Geophysical Year) goal of launching a satellite, to study the radiation environment in near Earth space. When the NRL's Project Vanguard was selected over Project Orbiter for the IGY, von Braun re-tooled the proposal as a test bed for IRBM re-entry vehicles, removing the fourth stage in the process. The hope there was that, eventually, the Eisenhower administration would see reason and greenlight Project Orbiter. Which they did, but only after the launch of Sputnik and several failed Vanguard launch attempts. Interestingly, the first tests of the Jupiter-C in 1956 included a dummy fourth stage that was very specifically filled with sand in order to prevent it from achieving orbit. There were all kinds of concerns about satellite overflight rights at the time, and it was seen as imperative that the first satellite launched be a civilian one. EDIT: And it's a mis-nomer to say that Juno I was a Jupiter-C with an additional first stage. The Jupiter-C was a Jupiter-A vehicle with the fourth stage and a different first stage fuel. Juno I is just another name for Jupiter-C. Making things more confusing is the fact that the Jupiter-A and Jupiter-C are both derived from Redstone, and are unrelated to the Jupiter IRBM. It's not surprising that the Wikipedia article got things wrong.

I'll do you one better: Smallpox. Possibly the greatest killer in human history, and the disease responsible for literally dozens of pandemics. Quoting from Wikipedia: "During the 20th century, it is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300–500 million deaths". And now it's gone, and nobody has to worry about catching it ever again, thanks to vaccines. Now tell me again that "Vaccines are bad for us".

Except supercomputers don't use a 128-bit address space. Actually, supercomputer processors are, taken individually, typically lower performance than the CPUs you'd find in a good gaming rig. The trick with supercomputers is that they have a massive number of processors and extremely high inter-processor bandwidth, and get all of their performance advantages from extreme parallelization.

This. The only thing the Moon has to recommend it is its proximity in travel time. Place it anywhere else in the Solar System, and it drops to the very bottom of the list of places that would be interesting to visit. Even by the standards of other minor rocky bodies it's a bone-dry carcinogenic ball of silicates and dust. You can't even use the "preparing for a Mars mission" argument, since there's going to be nearly no common technologies. The environment on the surface of the Moon almost completely fails to resemble the environment on Mars, and designs for dedicated lunar habs, landers, rovers, power systems, etc. are all going to be very poorly designed or straight up unusable for a Mars mission. And what resources would these be, exactly? There's some water, but not nearly enough for industry, especially if it's being used as fuel. Everything else it's got is also stuff that's as common as dirt on Earth. Plus, even if you did start mining stuff on the Moon, your proposed lunar industry is still going to be dependent on Earth for anything not made exclusively of a common metal. Any industry on the Moon is going to produce exclusively such things as are made only of metal and have reason to specifically be in lunar space, and that's not enough to support more than a small mining settlement. One of the big things recommending Mars on the industry front is that it does have resources. Lots of them, in usable quantities. Martian civilization can, in principle, become self-sufficient and bootstrapping. A lunar civilization simply can't, because it lacks the resources. Sending stuff into space is expensive, and a goal of any plan for long-term activity should be to make that activity as independent of support from Earth as possible. High dependence on trade is all well and good from an economics standpoint, but it's not very useful in times of crisis.

Computer science, which neatly explains why it wasn't too hard for me to find something.

Already have the job in the field of study lined up and waiting for me. Whether or not I like it remains to be seen, but I have high hopes.

Today, my time as a college student ended. I turned in my last assignment for the semester, and since I have no finals (hooray), this means that I'm done with all work for this semester. And, since this is the final semester of my bachelor's and I have no intention of going to grad school unless (and I stress that this is unlikely) a prospective employer requests it of me, being done with this semester means being done with college in general. It's a weird feeling. I hadn't realized how much of my identity was defined by being a student, before I suddenly wasn't.

Well look at you, living in a place where residences have AC.

It varies from save to save. My NCD caveman career, for example, had ships named after Simon & Garfunkel songs. As to how I pick the scheme for each save, it's mostly just any list that I know well, and that's long enough that I'm unlikely to run out before I finish doing whatever it is I started that save to do. Oh, and that's silly. The names have to be silly. Hence me naming the engine module(s) for an interplanetary craft Why Don't You Write Me?

7/10 ain't bad. Though, what do you have against the Ausable River? It's a heck of a lot prettier (not to mention cleaner) than the Hudson. Location: Frenzied birthday preparations (less than 2 weeks left) 8/10. That's more effort than I think I've put into all my birthdays combined. I was never (and still am not) much of one for parties.

Location: Houston TX 6/10. Points for specificity, but I don't envy you your weather.

Location: Virginia, United States of 'Murica 5/10. It's a good location, but I've been having "fun" with filling out Virginia state taxes for an internship I had in Arlington, so unfortunately your state has turned me against it.

The forum supports polls, you know.

Found this on Spotify the other day, and I've had it on repeat ever since. I swear, the day I stick something from this millennium in this thread is the day pigs will fly.